With the death of his father, 11-year-old Ramasan is now considered the man of his family of Chechen refugees living in Macondo, a tough working-class suburb of Vienna. The hopeful boy begins to see a father figure in an old friend of his father.

At a very young age, he has to deal with a lot of responsibility, questions of honor and identity, and the overpowering image of his dead war-hero father.

The main cast consists of lay actors, who have never acted in a film before but had similar life experiences to the characters they play. (Abu Dhabi Film Festival)

Visit Vienna as a tourist and you aren’t likely to see kids like Ramasan, the 11-year-old subject of docu director Sudabeh Mortezai’s empathetically observed fiction debut, “Macondo.” To find such foreigners, one must venture to the outskirts, where the eponymous immigrant settlement offers housing to nearly 2,000 refugees taking shelter from their home countries.

As an Iranian who split her childhood between Tehran and Vienna, Mortezai can clearly identify with the confused emotional state of her young protagonist, treating his unique situation as one example of Austria’s complex immigrant experie. (Peter Debruge, variety)

"I discovered Macondo by accident. I had heard there was a settlement on the outskirts of Vienna that had been housing refugees since the 1950s, with 2000 people from over 20 nations co-existing in cheap social housing. I started to develop something by working with the people there to create a strong narrative rooted in an authentic world."